Networkshop attendee Jill Bell, network manager at the University of Bradford, explains how our longest-running conference series offers such a valuable experience to attendees.
Network managers and technical system and security specialists from the UK research and education community are invited to join us at Networkshop44 which takes place between 22-24 March at the University of Manchester. Jill, who has attended the event more than a dozen time, tells us it’s the perfect opportunity to share experiences and learn about the latest developments.
Book your place at Networkshop.
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Digifest attendee Conrad Taylor, e-learning manager at City of Wolverhampton College, describes the buzz around Jisc’s annual celebration of digital technology in education and research.
We’re inviting digital practitioners and managers to join us at Digifest 2016 at the ICC in Birmingham on 2-3 March. Conrad, who attended the event for the first time last year, explains the excitement around the event and gives attendees his tips on making the most of the experience.
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The Association of Colleges (AoC) Beacon Awards took place on 17 November, celebrating best practice in further education (FE). Jisc sponsored the award for effective use of technology in further education (FE). It was won this year by South Eastern Regional College for its BLADES programme, which uses peer mentoring to support the digital capabilities of staff and students.
In this podcast we speak to Paula Philpott, ILT pedagogy mentor at the college, to find out about the programme and what it means to win.
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On the final day of the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference, Paul McKean, head of further education and skills for Jisc, talks about his highlights over the past three days, the main themes that have emerged, and how Jisc can help support colleges going forward.
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Day two of the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference saw Phil Richards, Jisc's chief innovation officer, join City of Liverpool College Group to host a session on 'delivering accelerated transformation', which focused on the power of shared services for creating efficiencies and transforming further education.
Here, Phil speaks with Val Keay, marketing manager, about the college's shared services vehicle - SharEd - and how Jisc is supporting work in this area.
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A graduate trainee from Lancaster University has been named the winner of a competition to design an app that uses open data to help students at key points in their learning journey. His prize is expert support worth £5,000 from Jisc to develop his idea into a prototype.
John Lacey, who is enrolled on Ambitious Futures: The Graduate Leadership Programme for University Leadership, entered the competition – run by Universities UK (UUK) in partnership with the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Jisc – with an app concept called BookMart. This will use open data including institutional reading lists to help students locate the books they need for their course across various free and paid for sources, giving them a more cost effective route to accessing course materials.
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John Lacey and Jisc chief executive Paul Feldman at the open data mashup day
To enter the competition, applicants had to submit a short video and description of their ideas for transforming the student experience using open data to Jisc’s Elevator website. Students and staff were then invited to vote for their favourite ideas.
John’s was one of six shortlisted projects to be invited to attend the open data mashup day on 17 November at Woburn House, London. Here, challenge finalists got the chance to learn and take inspiration from data experts. Sessions were led by Sir Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the ODI, with support from the University of Southampton, the Open University and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). They then formed into teams for student journey workshops to develop demo visualisations, before pitching to a panel of judges.
BookMart was commended for adding value by combining data on courses, library catalogues and booksellers, to enable students to locate the books they require in the most cost effective way. The judges were also impressed that users would be able to share and review books, and that whilst there are numerous websites for resale of textbooks, no other product of this type offering the student an holistic view is available at present.
John will now receive £5,000 worth of support from Jisc to help him to develop the idea into a prototype app.
John said:
“The open data mashup day was an amazing and immersive experience. It was an opportunity to learn from other universities and work collaboratively with developers that are considered gurus within their fields.
“It is a great achievement to have secured support from such a renowned digital technology charity, and I would like to thank Jisc for providing this fantastic opportunity.
“Given the strength of the other finalists’ ideas and pitches within the challenge, the final outcome was not one that I initially anticipated and I am ecstatic to have been chosen as the winner.
“As we move forward with establishing a working prototype, I hope that the BookMart app will play an important role in the movement towards increasingly open data across the higher education sector.”
Ian Powling, who is digital programmes lead at UUK and chaired the judging panel, said:
“John’s pitch clearly showed that he had considered how he could combine data from different sources to add value to a great product idea.”
Martin Hamilton, futurist at Jisc, and one of the competition judges, said:
“I was hugely impressed by all the ideas I saw during the challenge. Whenever we talk to students we see that they are positively fizzing with ideas and enthusiasm, and it’s great to be able to give them an opportunity to share those ideas and potentially take them further.
“BookMart in particular stood out for proposing a well-thought out solution to a universal problem faced by university students. As part of working with John to take BookMart forward, we will now be looking to engage with e-learning and library systems teams at institutions to explore making reading lists available as open data.”
The open data mashup day is part of Creating Value from Open Data, a joint project between UUK, ODI, Jisc, the National Union of Students (NUS) and several partner universities. The project team is mapping out the value proposition for open data in UK higher education, and will be producing an open data vision and roadmap for UK higher education.
For more information please contact Ian Powling or Martin Hamilton.
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South Eastern Regional College (SERC) has received a Beacon Award for a project which helps students gain essential skills, through a peer mentoring programme that supports the effective use of technology for learning, both inside and outside of the classroom.
The award for Effective Use of Technology in FE, sponsored by Jisc, was given for the BLADES programme, which helps students to gain literacy, numeracy and ICT skills as well as enhancing their digital literacy. The college also uses virtual classrooms to enable students to develop their understanding through a range of approaches, including game-based learning.
It received the prestigious Beacon Award from the Association of Colleges (AoC), the membership organisation for further education colleges. The awards celebrate colleges which demonstrate excellent teaching and innovative thinking in the further education sector in creating positive opportunities for both staff and students.
Dr Michael Malone, director of curriculum and information services at SERC, said:
"The college is delighted that the pedagogy mentoring programme – which has been completed by 400 staff – has been recognised with such a prestigious award. The benefits for essential skills tutors and their learners is evident, with achievement rates increasing by 13%, and last year there were over four million Moodle hits.
"This peer mentoring programme has been successfully rolled out across all professional and technical areas in SERC since 2008. SERC has also been able to implement this approach both nationally and internationally, in Singapore and Japan."
Pete Scott, director of Jisc group customer services, said:
“Even in the three years that we’ve been a sponsor for this award, there’s been a marked growth in the prominence of technology in the further education sector. I’m pleased to see the conversation is moving beyond technology as simply an enhancer of learning – although it certainly does this – to it being a strategic enabler delivering sustainable and effective business outcomes.
“That technology has been identified by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills as key to leveraging successful outcomes for all in the area reviews reinforces this movement, and we look forward to supporting the optimisation of technology into the future.
“Once again we were astounded by the excellent standard of entries. All of the shortlisted applicants should be applauded in their efforts to deliver truly creative and innovative experiences, but special recognition of course must go to South Eastern Regional College.”
Roger Marriott, chief assessor for the Beacon Awards, said:
“Every year the Beacon Awards receive a large number of excellent submissions and the high standard made it hard for assessors to determine the winning application in each category.
“All the entries demonstrated the commitment of colleges to create the best possible experience for their students. South Eastern Regional College can be rightly proud to be named as the winner of the category.”
Dame Pat Bacon, chair of the Beacon Awards, said:
“South Eastern Regional College is an outstanding representative of the excellent work happening in colleges across the country.
“It is a privilege to oversee these awards which allow us to celebrate the exemplary and innovative work colleges are developing to support their students, staff, employers and local communities, as well as helping to support our recovering economy.”
Representatives of the colleges were invited to the AoC annual conference and exhibition where the results were announced. A local presentation ceremony will take place in the new year.
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We're attending the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference this week, which for 2015 has the theme 'powering the economy'. Day one included the Beacon Awards, which celebrates best practice in further education.
John Potter, head of Jisc south and east, was one of the award judges. He speaks with Val Keay, marketing manager, about the judging process and tells us about the winner of the Jisc-funded award for the Effective use of Technology in FE - South Eastern Regional College (SERC).
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In this podcast we hear from Jisc subject specialist for accessibility and inclusion, Margaret McKay about the issues that learners with sight loss face when accessing information. She also relays advice from learners with visual impairments and sight loss about the technologies and tools they find useful. Read the original blog post.
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In this podcast Julia Taylor, Jisc subject specialist - accessibility and inclusion, discusses how dyslexia can affect learning, and offers her top tips for using technology to support independent study. Read the original blog.
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We’re delighted to support the team behind Call for Participants who are currently showcasing their project at this year’s prestigious Web Summit conference in Dublin. Call for Participants grew from Jisc’s 2013 Summer of Student Innovation co-design project. In this podcast, recorded at Web Summit, Matthew Terrell tells us how important Jisc’s support has been to the team and gives his top tips for succeeding as a digital innovator.
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Over the past few months we've been conducting interviews with projects in our research data spring, to find out more about their work, progress to date, and how they've found the process so far.
We also want to find out about the people behind the ideas and get to know them and their aspirations.
Here, we speak to Joy Davidson from the Digital Curation Centre about a project to improve how institutions support research data management.
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Richard French, international co-ordinator at Jisc, attended the EDUCAUSE annual conference in the US on the 27-30 October 2015. EDUCAUSE is the association for higher education IT professionals in the US and their conference is one of the largest educational technology events in the world.
Following research undertaken last year which found that IT managers were not always involved in leadership decisions, where their skills and knowledge could benefit their institution. Richard talks to attendees to find out how much progress has been made in getting IT professionals a seat at the management table.
For more information about our work with EDUCAUSE, read the project blog.
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Open science has been highlighted as one of the priorities of the Dutch presidency of the European Union in 2016. Matthew Dovey discusses the motivations behind the open science movement and why initiatives to support it are more important than ever. Read his original blog.
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Richard French tells us how Jisc is supporting UK researchers and universities in their international research and collaboration. Read his original blog here.
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For open access week 2015, project officer Mafalda Picarra describes some recently produced resources to support development of effective OA policies. Read her original blog.
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As part of open access (OA) week 2015, Sarah Fahmy, Jisc’s scholarly communications services manager, shares her insights into OA and gives her top tips on implementation.
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Discover how broadcast hubs, created in partnership with Globelynx and empowered by Janet, the Jisc network, are providing institutions across the UK with a direct line to the world’s media.
Dr Rachel McLean from the Liverpool Screen School at Liverpool John Moores University and Professor Tom Jackson from Loughborough University discuss how a joint project to establish broadcast hubs within UK institutions has enabled more and better quality interactions with the media.
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At Jisc, we want more people to access high quality services and technologies across education groups and sectors. We’re thrilled to be starting new projects which harness the unique combination of speed, reliability and security our Janet network offers.
We know from a recent HEPI report that using the network saves money, contributing annual costs savings alone of more than £200 million across universities. But, as the report explains:
“institutions also gain advantage through the top-class digital facilities and resources that all UK researchers, lecturers and students access and derive value from each day.”
In other words, the network is not just a research tool or an efficiency saving - it’s a workhorse for all kinds of valuable academic work, in all sorts of fields.
The network has been running for many years, so why are we still getting excited about it? Because it’s more than an academic exercise, it’s a facilitator of great technological change – and there are some new projects underway to tap into its potential. Here’s an insight into some of them.
We know that, increasingly, institutions need to promote and protect their brand in part because they are now so much more visible through news and social media.
If we could facilitate more, and better, interactions with the press and media, we could potentially save universities money they’d otherwise be spending on advertising. People would also start to know more about their university and about academia if broadcast media could have better access to the university experts.
Media outlets are often reluctant to send a truck to a remote place to interview an expert in a particular field. With this in mind a project was born to stream content to broadcasters, enabling a growing number of universities to use their Janet network connection to provide live news content.
We’re now going live with three ‘broadcast hubs’ around the UK. These hubs have been established in partnership with Globelynx, which has provided hardware including cameras, lighting, sound equipment and encoding and decoding systems as well as a database which makes it easier for broadcasters and experts to schedule interviews.
In addition to providing the network, Jisc has supplied funding to allow three host institutions – Imperial College London, Loughborough University and Liverpool John Moores University – to purchase the equipment necessary to create a professional studio with the supporting technology needed to broadcast the highest quality sound and audio content.
Other universities will be able to book time at these hubs, allowing excellent access to some of the best studios in the UK. And it’s not just universities benefiting from the work – other organisations including museums, hospital trusts, colleges and schools will be able to use the hubs to connect with the media.
Our high speed, low latency, reliable network is just what the media needs for interviews ‘down the line’. Researchers and academics can have their say without an outlet having to send an interviewer or mobile studio, or being forced to rely on the public internet with all the quality problems those connections can bring. It’s quicker, cheaper, and more convenient, and we hope it will allow more academics to have their expert voices heard.
Professor of information and knowledge management at Loughborough University, Tom Jackson, who has previously appeared on BBC News and Panorama to discuss his research , explains in this podcast how the hub technology removes key practical barriers between academic staff and the media.
He said:
“The broadcast hub means I can go to a convenient location on campus, hook up with our own media team, and do broadcasts straight down the wire.
A media appearance once required a two-day trip to a studio in Birmingham or Manchester – now I can get a piece done and be back in my office within ten minutes. This saves me lots of time, which I can spend on my research and my students instead.
With this new system in place, many more academics will want to do pieces for the media because they can fit the activity into their diary. As an institution, this helps further the reach and impact of our research.”
Find out more about how people have been using the network to stream to broadcasters, and what the media have to say about the service.
Watch musicians at sites in Edinburgh and London play in real-time over the Janet network.
In our digital age it is not only important for universities to promote themselves through the media, but also to raise their profile through joint working and digital partnerships with companies or other universities in the UK and abroad. Not only does the technology of our network allow this type of collaboration, but it also helps to improve students’ skills and experience and makes them ready for a digital workplace.
We’ve been able to connect music and dance performers across the globe using some unique streaming technology. LOw LAtency Audio Visual Streaming System, or LOLA (created by our Italian counterparts GARR and the Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Tartini), makes it possible to interact naturally with others across vast distances via a high speed, high performance network such as Janet.
Previous attempts to rehearse or perform by link-up have not been the ‘real deal’ that our network and LOLA can offer: either they are time-delayed in some way (which is sometimes effective, but not suitable for simultaneous performance) or the delay between sites is unacceptable. Janet and LOLA can broadcast in such high quality sound and with such a short (indeed, undetectable) delay that it’s possible to rehearse, workshop and perform in real time, satisfying even the finely-tuned ears of professional musicians.
We’re already part of a national Royal Shakespeare Company project to stream broadcasts of Shakespeare’s plays which relies on our servers for speed, quality and reliability. In the past five years, these hugely popular broadcasts have been viewed by more than 60,000 students.
The events demonstrate the Janet network core’s capability of handling large volumes of digital information. Past broadcasts, which are streamed into school classrooms at 720p HD, have used more than 1TB over a three-hour period. Our world class infrastructure allows 38 National Student Television Association (NaSTA) stations and 77 Student Radio Association (SRA) stations to offer these live streaming channels.
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New agreement seeks to reduce costs and administration of meeting OA mandate requirements for researchers and institutions in the UK.
Starting today, researchers in the UK will be able to publish their articles open access in over 1,600 Springer hybrid journals without cost barriers or administrative barriers. The Springer Compact agreement is a pilot that combines open access publishing and subscription access in one annual fee and will run from October 2015 until December 2018.
The transformative agreement between Springer and Jisc will make it easier for UK researchers to publish open access and ensure that that all articles published comply with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), Research Councils UK (RCUK)’s open access policy and the policies of other major funders such as the Charity Open Access Fund. At the same time, for institutions, the total cost as well as the administrative burden of open access publishing and continuing access to the 2,000 Springer subscription journals are significantly reduced.
Over the lifetime of the deal, Jisc and Springer will continue to monitor and evaluate the arrangement to ensure that it continues to meet UK higher education institutions’ needs and funding compliance requirements as the open access environment evolves.
Liam Earney, director of Jisc Collections, said,
“With this agreement the amount of research made open access by UK authors will increase substantially. We have worked hard with Springer and institutions to devise an agreement that does this in a way that limits the costs and administration for institutions, whilst helping them to ensure they are compliant with the requirements of all research funders.
Most importantly we believe that this agreement demonstrates that it is possible to transition from subscription to open access in a way that is sustainable for institutions and publishers."
Juliane Ritt, executive vice-president, global hybrid OA initiatives at Springer, added,
“The constructive negotiations between Springer and Jisc, which were infused with a true spirit of innovation, have resulted in a milestone agreement that is truly transformative. UK researchers can now rest assured that payment and mandated requirements are taken care of for them. By enabling them to publish in over 1,600 high-quality Springer journals, Springer and Jisc are working together to support UK’s path to open access publishing.”
Chris Banks, director of library services, Imperial College London, said
“I applaud Springer for working with Jisc Collections on this innovative new publishing business model. It is a model which will deliver open access to UK research findings but which considerably reduces the administrative and cost burden of doing so, for researchers, for institutions and for the publisher themselves. It allows academics maximum visibility of their work and it eliminates the messy article level transactional activity between libraries and the publisher.”
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The University of Edinburgh publishes thousands of articles by thousands of authors every year. So how is it coping with the changing tide towards open access?
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Stuart Lewis, University of Edinburgh Stuart Lewis, University of Edinburgh
Stuart Lewis, the university's head of research and learning services and deputy director of library and university collections, describes the ups and downs of open access life at a research-intensive institution.
What are the main challenges that universities face in implementing open access policies?
"These days the process of making a journal article, conference paper, or book chapter open access should be easy. There are well prescribed routes, such as green through an online repository, or gold via a payment to the publisher. However every publisher has their own set of policies, and even within a single publisher’s portfolio of journals there may be differing terms. In addition, with some hybrid publishers (where a gold payment is optional), we often find that their gold payment processes are new or require additional contact in order to get the paper opened up correctly and with the correct licence.
The differing requirements of each funder, even within a single discipline, can also cause confusion. Some funders prefer gold, some green, some have no preference. Some require open access within a set time from the point of publication, others from the point of acceptance. While there has been some harmonisation among funders, particularly around how to record and report on article processing charge (APC) expenditure, this confusion makes it hard for authors to know whether they are doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Now that multiple policies can apply to a single paper - for example both Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Research Councils UK (RCUK) - this situation gets even harder.
While the members of our academic community are now mostly aware of the benefits and requirements of open access, especially since it is now a REF requirement, they still need assistance from staff with skills in understanding, translating, and putting into practice the policies of publishers. It seems that simply making an item open access is a lot harder than it really needs to be, which causes extra cost and confusion."
How are these challenges different for different kinds of universities?
"The University of Edinburgh is a large, research-intensive, multidisciplinary institution. This means that every year we publish thousands of papers written by thousands of authors. Our challenges are therefore providing support services to such a large group of people working across a wide set of disciplines.
Any large research-led university will face similar problems in ensuring that every single author understands the requirements for open access, and how they work with the support services to ensure their papers are made open access. Due to the generous funding received by funders who prefer gold open access (such as the Wellcome Trust and RCUK), there tends to be enough resources to make all the papers gold that need to be, while still following our institutional preference for green open access.
Some smaller or more teaching-oriented institutions have opposite problems. They have smaller communities who undertake research, meaning that developing relationships with each and every author is an easier process, yet their access to gold open access funds is much smaller or more limited. They may also not be able to dedicate the same amount of effort to providing open access support."
The theme for this year's open access week is "collaboration". What does that theme mean to you in the context of Edinburgh and its work with open access?
"At the University of Edinburgh Library we are lucky in that we get to collaborate in many different ways. Firstly we collaborate within the university. Due to the fact that we have over 5,800 academic staff, the support services for open access are spread right across the institution. There are three colleges (humanities and social science, science and engineering, medicine and veterinary medicine) and 21 schools. Each of those units employs local research support staff - some who are dedicated purely to supporting open access, and some who have a wider research support role. We collaborate closely with these staff to deliver a comprehensive open access support service. Many of these staff choose to work in the library with us one day a week, in order to collaborate more closely.
We also collaborate across Scotland. For example we run the Scottish Digital Library Consortium that, among other services, offers DSpace repository hosting to a number of other institutions. This collaboration allows us to provide a higher level of repository support to each institution than they might afford alone, and allows the community to collaborate together to advance this aspect of our service.
Nationally and internationally we collaborate on a number of initiatives, whether through Jisc, RLUK, COAR, DuraSpace, or other similar groups. Sometimes this is to help develop new systems (for example via the PURE UK user group), to develop new standards (for example SWORD was co-developed at the University of Edinburgh), or to collectively assist funders in reviews of their open access policies."
How has open access enabled different parts of your university to work more closely together?
"As I mentioned earlier, we now work much more closely with research support staff within the university’s 21 schools. This is a new collaborative relationship that we didn’t used to have, and this has provided extra benefits to the research support activities offered by the library, for example in the area of research data management.
This academic year we are predicting that we will spend over £1m in gold APCs. Processing this number of invoices, many of which are overseas payments or have complexities such as reverse VAT charges, has meant we work much more closely with our finance department. Over the past couple of years we have overhauled our payment workflows, moving everything from old paper-based processes to online systems. This has meant that we are now able to process our gold payments much more efficiently.
As many of the open access requirements come from funder policies, we have developed strong relationships with groups such as Edinburgh Research and Innovation (ERI) and our governance and strategic planning group. We work together to develop good governance around our planning and thinking about open access, and to ensure that the university exceeds any requirements placed on us.
Finally we work with an increasing number of journals and local journal editors who choose to publish through our journal hosting service. This service makes use of the open source Open Journals System (OJS) platform allowing us to provide very cost effective journal hosting. On average, it costs us less to host a whole journal each year than it does to pay an average hybrid journal APC!
We now host a dozen different journals, supporting both student publishing efforts, and traditional international peer-reviewed journals. This is particularly exciting, as all of our published content is open access, and we’re seeing innovative new publishing techniques used by some of the journals. In addition to this we’re starting to work closely with Edinburgh University Press to support each other’s open access initiatives and to look for ways to develop interesting new approaches for open access publishing."
How has the open access landscape evolved since the Finch report?
"The internal landscape has changed dramatically. Since the adoption of strong open access requirements by RCUK, the tide changed very quickly for many authors. Prior to the Finch report, publications that were made open access would have been in a minority. This is no longer the case and the majority of our papers are open access. We now joke that “every week is open access week” because no one week is any different to the others when it comes to the routine nature that open access has become.
In addition to this, the question of why research outputs should be made available open access are much more universally accepted. Many of our interactions with authors now concentrate on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of open access.
The RCUK response to open access came with significant levels of funding for gold open access APCs. Before that, it was only really the Wellcome Trust that provided significant levels of gold funding. This has meant that a much larger proportion of our papers can now benefit from the immediacy afforded by gold open access.
With the significant extra funding for gold open access we have seen many new publishers and open access schemes develop. Lots of these are innovative, and provide authors and readers with high quality publishing services, or with efficient workflows for open access support staff. In particular we’ve seen a number of different types of membership schemes that assist with the efficient processing of gold APCs for both the publisher and the institution."
What are the key Jisc services for open access at Edinburgh?
"One of our key Jisc partners in this area is Jisc Collections which negotiates on our behalf with publishers. Despite the increasing amount of APCs payments that are going to hybrid publishers, we’ve yet to see real and significant offsetting against library subscriptions. This means that in many cases the ‘total cost of publishing’ has risen sharply, as we are paying both subscriptions and APCs.
In an ideal world, the subscriptions should fall proportionally to the increasing APCs. Jisc Collections is now building in elements of ‘offsetting’ into new subscription negotiations. We’re seeing some publishers responding positively to this, which will allow us to make even more content available as gold open access. For example, if we know that for every pound we spend on APCs one is deducted from our library subscription, then we could spend more on gold APCs, knowing that our subscription will reduce accordingly. This could make a transition to more gold open access publishing easy.
Like every open access support group in the UK, and probably around the world, we rely heavily on the Jisc SHERPA RoMEO service. Having a single authoritative source of publisher policies is invaluable to us. This is an excellent example of where Jisc is saving significant amounts of time in every institution by providing a central shared service of trustworthy information."
Edinburgh leads one of the Jisc open access pathfinder projects; how has being involved in that programme helped Edinburgh?
"We’re lucky that we have been involved in numerous Jisc projects relating to open access for well over 10 years now. From our initial projects looking into open access electronic theses (Theses Alive!), through projects looking at interoperability (SWORD, REDIC), to open access metrics (OAIndex), we have been deeply involved in the development and evolution of open access practice in the UK.
The pathfinder project we have (LOCH - Lessons in Open access Compliance in Higher education) sees us working alongside the University of St Andrews and Heriot Watt University. Together we are documenting the lessons that each partner is learning as we deliver our own open access services in institutions of different shapes and sizes. This allows us to learn from one another, develop common best practice, and share the outcomes with the wider UK community. While we have different institutional profiles, we share common infrastructure elements such as PURE and DSpace."
What do you hope for from Jisc in 2016 to help universities implement open access?
"Personally, I hope that we will see good and fair offsetting agreements becoming a normal part of library subscriptions. This will help to ensure that the public money that is being used to pay for the APCs is used as fairly and economically as possible. Publishers who embrace offsetting will benefit from seeing a larger transition to gold open access, therefore providing faster access to high quality research, increasing readership, and impact.
Many of the offsetting deals have attempted to maintain subscriptions at their full rate, and to discount APCs. However this only seems to be offered in order to protect the subscriptions. What we want to do is to pay the full price of gold open access publishing - this is only fair to the publishers. If, for example, it costs £1,200 to publish a paper, then it is fair that we pay that full price, not discounted. However, in return, we require fairness from hybrid publishers. If, for example, 10% of their outputs are fully funded through gold APCs, then there should be a similar fall in subscriptions. This is, of course, made more complex by variations in gold versus green approaches taken by different countries around the world but we’re seeing meaningful responses to this in the form of direct offsetting for each institution in terms of their own adoption of gold open access rather than that of the entire world.
As the University of Edinburgh now spends around £1m a year in gold APCs, it will make a significant difference to the university if a proportion of that is deducted from library subscriptions, in order to invest in further research or teaching."
If you could change one thing, overnight, about the current open access landscape, what would it be and why?
"I think the biggest problem is perhaps inconsistency: inconsistency between funders, and inconsistency between publishers. This is what makes open access hard, and why it worries many authors. When there are so many different things to watch out for when making an article open access, whether that be copyright transfer, embargoes, publisher and journal specific policies, different Creative Commons licences, APC payments, and compliance periods, I can see why authors usually turn to research support professionals, such as those in libraries, to assist.
If many of these aspects could be standardised, the costs associated with open access would be dramatically decreased, the confidence of authors would increase, and the impact and accessibility of world-leading and life-changing research would improve significantly."
International open access week takes place between 19-25 October 2015.
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Jisc welcomes the League of European Research Universities (LERU) call to coordinate national and international actions in support of open access (OA).
Neil Jacobs, Jisc’s head of scholarly communications says:
“The LERU call’s for clarity in various areas of OA is welcome, and builds on our work such as the 'principles of offsetting agreements', the international OA policy schema, and our new initiative working with publishers to improve how their journal OA policies are expressed, including embargo periods and licences.
We also agree that international coordination of this kind is likely to be effective in making a step change on OA during the period of the Dutch EC presidency, and would be an excellent legacy of that presidency.
Jisc looks forward to working with the LERU and others to hasten a move to OA that is sustainable for all stakeholders, and that benefits research and the wider economy and society.”
Jisc has been actively supporting the transition to OA for 15 years and continues to do so via negotiations with publishers, provision of services to help researchers and professionals, and expert input into policy debates, to make this transition as low-cost and maximum benefit as possible for UK universities.
Find out more about our support for open access.
International open access week takes place between 19-25 October 2015.
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In this podcast, Brian Kelly describes his experience of steering institutions towards the social web and makes an argument for continued risk-taking. In the wake of Jisc’s naming of the 50 most influential higher education professionals using social media, he also gives a nod to technologists and IT heads who are setting new standards in digital.
Brian Kelly has supported the adoption of emerging web technologies across the UK higher education community for 20 years. He is now an independent consultant.
via Jisc news
As part of our digital futures’ activity, we have been assessing emerging opportunities and technology trends to enable informed decision making by us and our customers.
This week we're publishing the first of the main key themes from the horizon scan project: The future of cloud computing. We pick up with Jisc's futurist Martin Hamilton to find out more.
Read the full version of our report online or sign up to our webinar on 12 October.
via Jisc news
Throughout the summer we’ve been conducting interviews with various projects that are part of the research data spring, to find out more about their work, their backgrounds, and how they’ve found the process.
In this series of interviews we take the time to dig a little deeper into the thinking behind these projects and get to know a little more about the work and the people behind them.
Jenny Mitcham from the University of York and Chris Awre from the University of Hull talk about their work with Archivematica and others to develop software that will automatically save research data and help fill what they call the ‘preservation gap’.
via Jisc news